Lossless Audio Compression

The lossless compression method that is especially widely used and available on virtually all operating systems, including: GNU/Linux, MS Windows, Macintosh OS X, BeOS, Solaris, and BSD Unix is: FLAC ("free lossless audio codec"), which is a free, open-source program that provides a good compression ratio with fairly rapid compression and very rapid decompression. It is also the only lossless compression method with hardware support.

Shorten, often called shn, is a lossless compression system developed by Softsound. A variety of information and links to other resources can be obtained here. Source code can be downloaded here. A Macintosh OS X port. MKW Audio Compression Tool reportedly also supports SHN compression under MS Windows. However, use of Shorten has declined in recent years and the software is no longer developed.

Other lossless compression methods freely available for GNU/Linux and MS Windows include:

• Lossless Audio
• LPAC
• Monkey's Audio
• OptimFrog
• TTA
• Wavepack

Although Monkey's Audio is only directly supported on MS Windows, there is an unofficial Java library that can be used to implement it easily on any platform with J2SE.

A number of comparisons of compression ratio, compression speed, and decompression speed have been published:

• http://members.home.nl/w.speek/comparison.htm
• http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/lossless.htm
• http://www.lossless-audio.com/comparison.htm
• http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

Ordered by compression ratio:

Ordered by compression time:

Ordered by decompression time:

With linguistic data as with music, Lossless Audio provides the best compression, at the cost of compression and decompression times considerably greater than those of other programs.

Revised 2011-01-30.